Phillies

I have to admit that, when the Yankees are in the playoffs, most of my regular TV watching gets obliterated. Thankfully, DVRs and online TV sites (and, in the mid-'90s, VCRs) help me catch up. For instance, even though I have to review Cougar Town, I'll likely won't watch it until tomorrow morning, on either ABC.com or Hulu. Why? World Series game one, of course. Nothing, not even the Yankees being behind 22-0, is going to tear me away from FOX at 9:30, when I should be watching Cougar Town on ABC.

Which leads me to something that I've been wondering lately: Didn't networks used to program more reruns against the World Series? Tonight, NBC has a lineup of new episodes, as does ABC (except for Charlie Brown in Hank's slot, for understandable reasons). Tomorrow, all three of FOX's competitors have new episodes.

(S05E06) Ooh! Things I learned in high school! This episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia was presented as a frame story, just like The Canterbury Tales. Did the gang out-Chaucer Chaucer!? Well, no, but it was a lot funnier than the Wife of Bath, I can promise you that.

There were a lot of excellent moments (read on to find out who won the "Best Retch-Face" award, which is as coveted as it is imaginary) and they made for a solid episode, though not one to immediately jump into my favorites. Admittedly, that's an unreasonable weekly expectation anyway. Oh well. At least we got some Greenman.

No, this is not going to be another post about the shoddy umpiring or spittle analysis or any of the other on-field matters that have been going on in baseball since the playoffs began. No, we're on a TV blog, so I'm going to just talk about the things that have annoyed me about FOX's and TBS's coverage of the ALCS and the NLCS. In no particular order:

1. The Fidelity-sponsored Fox Trak. The pitching tracker, which shows if a pitch actually hit the strike zone or not, has been around for years. But, the flight of the ball has been to this point represented by a red streak and a dot. Now that Fidelity Investments is sponsoring the tracker, the red streak/dot combo has been replaced by a green streak/green arrow combo that mimics Fidelity's "stay on the line" series of ads. What financial guidance has to do with balls and strikes, I'll never know.

How long will baseball fans have to wait to watch the end of game five of the World Series between the Phillies and the Rays? Well, it'll be at least another day. Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has canceled tonight's resumption of the suspended game five.

Oh, and you know that Barack Obama ad that is going to be shown from 8-8:30 on NBC and CBS (but not ABC)? It's also going to be on Fox, too. The World Series game will be pushed back to accommodate the Democratic Presidential candidate.

Don't flip out and cry foul! The TV gods anticipated that there might be a conflict when they sold the time slot to the Obama campaign. In fact, they had the opportunity to turn them down. But Fox was inclined to take the ad revenue.